The agrégation de philosophie and the Emergence of French philosophical Nietzscheanism

Alan Douglas Schrift (Grinnell College)

Séminaire :

In this paper, I review the three “moments” of Nietzsche’s reception in France: first among writers of both the avant-garde Left and neo-royalist Right from the early 1890s until World War One; then among nonconformist intellectuals in the years before and after World War Two; and finally among philosophers in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that Nietzsche’s works were almost completely ignored by academic philosophers in France prior to the late 1950s, and that the reason behind academic philosophers turning their attention to Nietzsche can be traced to the appearance in 1958 of La Généalogie de la Morale on the reading list in French translation for the agrégation de philosophie. I then continue to correlate significant events in Nietzsche’s French reception to his subsequent appearances on the reading list for the agrégationthrough the 60s and 70s.

Alan D. Schriftis F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College (USA). In addition to over eighty published articles or book chapters on Nietzsche and French and German twentieth-century philosophy, he is the author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy(Blackwell, 2006), Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism(Routledge, 1995), and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1990). He has also edited seventeen books, including the eight-volume History of Continental Philosophy (Acumen/U Chicago Press, Routledge, 2010), The Logic of the Gift (Routledge,1997), and most recently Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings of Jean Wahl. (Fordham University Press, 2016). He continues as General Editor of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Stanford University Press translation of Nietzsche’s Kritische Studienausgabe (ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari).